This aerial photo shows spills from TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone pipeline, Friday, Nov. 17, 2017, that leaked an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil onto agricultural land in northeastern South Dakota, near Amherst, S.D., the company and state regulators said Thursday, but state officials don't believe the leak polluted any surface water bodies or drinking water systems. Wheile the cause was being investigated, longtime opponents of the pipeline—who are also trying to stop the construction of the new Keystone XL extension of the network—say the spill proves that TransCanada's promises of safety cannot be trusted. (Photo: DroneBase via AP)

Climate justice groups and local pipeline opponents in Nebraska are condemning an announcement by the state's Public Service Commission (PSC) which indicated late Friday that a massive underground spill of the existing Keystone pipeline in South Dakota this week will have no bearing on a pivotal approval decision to build the Keystone XL pipeline scheduled for Monday.

"This spill puts an exclamation point on the need to reject Keystone XL, but it doesn’t tell us anything we didn't already know about pipelines. They spill, and if Keystone XL is built, we can only expect more of the world's dirtiest oil spewing across farms, treaty lands, and throughout the Great Plains." —Sara Shor, 350.org

PSC spokesperson Deb Collins, citing a state law passed in 2011 which prevents the commission from factoring pipeline safety or the possibility of leaks into its decisions, said the panel's decision "will be based on the evidence in the record."

Local opponents of the project, as the Lincoln Journal Starnotes, were "incensed" by the announcement.

"There is a reason TransCanada and the big oil lobby did not want this information on the record," said Jane Kleeb, director of the Bold Alliance, a coalition of state-level groups that have opposed the Keystone XL for nearly a decade.

"That the Nebraska commissioners won't consider safety in their decision on Keystone XL should alarm everyone," said Sara Shor, a spokesperson for 350.org, one of the key national opponents of the pipeline. "This spill puts an exclamation point on the need to reject Keystone XL, but it doesn’t tell us anything we didn't already know about pipelines. They spill, and if Keystone XL is built, we can only expect more of the world's dirtiest oil spewing across farms, treaty lands, and throughout the Great Plains."

Kelly Martin, the Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign director at the Sierra Club, added, "We’ve always said it’s not a question of whether a pipeline will spill, but when, and today TransCanada is making our case for us. This is not the first time TransCanada’s pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won’t be the last. The PSC must take note: there is no such thing as a safe tar sands pipeline, and the only way to protect Nebraska communities from more tar sands spills is to say no to Keystone XL."

For those unclear about the difference between the existing Keystone pipeline and Keystone XL, 350.org offered this helpful explainer via Twitter:

1. Keystone 1 was completed in 2010 and just leaked 210,000 gallons of oil in SD2. Keystone XL is proposed, but missing a permit in Nebraska that will be decided on Monday #NoKXLpic.twitter.com/ktUaAwnEEp

Echoing a message shared by the many groups—local, nation, and international—350.org's Shor says this week's spill is just the most recent proof that a move away from fossil fuel and towards renewable, less damaging energy energy is urgently needed.

Further

Whew. That was way too close for comfort. And yeah, the country's in a sorry state to have come to this. But not only does Doug Jones become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Alabama in 25 years; his win is a blunt rejection of all the hate-mongering, gay-bashing, race-baiting, sexual-assaulting, serial lying crap of losers Moore and Trump and Bannon and their ugly ilk. Forward to mid-terms. And once and for all, to Moore in all his evil: "Fuck you and the horse you (badly) rode in on."